Since its launch about 2 years ago, PUBG Mobile has been a huge success for Tencent. This game has earned Tencent more than 1.5 billion USD, has been downloaded more than 600 million thanks to the cooperation with celebrities and many other titles. It also had an eSports tournament that attracted 50,000 participating teams in 2019, and became one of the big names in the mobile gaming industry . But did you know this extremely successful game was created in just four months?
That's right, you didn't read it wrong. The successful 2GB-based mobile game of PUBG PC version was made in just four months with the hands of Lightspeed & Quantum Studios. The game was born under the demand of a lot of gamers who do not own a computer but still want the opportunity to 'eat chicken,' or those who want to play anytime, anywhere.
Making PUBG Mobile for these gamers is not merely a PC version of the game on mobile. For the PUBG Mobile development team, the game is a huge technical and visual challenge. They will have to find answers to questions about how to adapt Bluehole's original game to a mobile device, including real-time HDR lighting rendering, calculating the flight path of each play. projectiles and more. Not to mention that they need to adapt the game to a variety of mobile devices, from Android devices of all configurations and operating system variants to unified and more closed iPhones.
To overcome the diversity of operating systems and configurations, Lightspeed & Quantum Studios formed a dedicated team for each difficult problem and worked on a 'top-down.' They will make the game run on high-end phones first, with the maximum image quality and then gradually reduce the image quality to help the game run smoothly on lower-end devices. The workload was so great that the studio director said they had received two to three years of experience in just two or three months.
The character controls also need to be adapted to the nature of the mobile device. When playing on a computer, gamers can control the character correctly and conveniently thanks to the mouse and keyboard, but mobile gamers often do not have these peripherals. Therefore, the development team removed operations such as opening doors, picking up items in PUBG Mobile and simplifying many other operations, while still trying to keep the game interesting. They also focused on adapting mouse-key gestures to the controller and touch screen of the phone.
Even the method of payment of gamers on PUBG Mobile is different. The development team said that they cleverly took advantage of the desire to turn their characters into unique, strange characters to create a Royale Pass very different from the PC version. 'The missions and rewards of each stage are carefully analyzed and considered. In order to satisfy the needs of gamers, we tried a lot of different plans, performed many studies on global gamers and chose the best design, ' studio director Lightspeed & Quantum said.
Tencent constantly monitors feedback from about 25 million gamers on the game's social media channels to tailor the game content to the player's wishes. They also use ongoing Live-Ops as a way to create content for their gamers. 'Whether in China or on the global version, we know how to retain users, how to attract people who have stopped playing and how to invite new players. So there are always many Live-Ops events happening almost every time. '
The developer also said that they attach great importance to the eSports platform of the game and therefore implemented a 'zero tolerance' policy with crooks. 'Nearly 95% of fraudulent accounts are automatically locked out of our systems. Other account lockdown penalties are based on player accusations, which help us greatly in making judgments for certain cases or when choosing a penalty. ' The studio director stated that hacking in the game has been reduced by 90% thanks to these measures.
In 2020, they want to create more opportunities for casual gamers to participate in the eSports world in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic originating from China that is raging around the globe and has offered a bonus of 5 million dollars for PUBG Mobile tournaments this year. Starting this year, our main goal is to help gamers establish interesting relationships through the game, '' said Tencent's global publisher. 'Some gamers have met true love through the game, some developed closer ties with their families, others have found dreams or become heroes of the country. That's what makes us proud. '